


Heartbreaker

by deuil



Category: One Piece
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:42:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24870070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deuil/pseuds/deuil
Summary: A quick character study on Law.  What he carries, and his grief.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 25





	Heartbreaker

Law was born with death under his skin.

Ask him about it, and he’ll say that it’s nothing special— the same went for every other man, woman, and child in Flevance. What Law knows is that the ticking time bomb in their veins wasn’t what made their circumstances particularly cruel; it was the fact that they bled red like any other person. 

***

Recollections of his father have faded with time. Most of what remains of Trafalgar Senior is muscle memory, the feeling of a warm palm over the back of Law’s hand. Strong fingers guiding Law through the process of bisecting a frog from sternum to throat. 

Death had felt reverent, back then. Each lukewarm piece of an organism’s biology, explained with affection and care. Close his eyes, and Law can still remember the weight of that amphibious heart, featherlight on the tip of his index.

***

He wishes his father’s medical textbooks had told him what fifteen bullet holes in an adult man’s torso feels like. What two and a half liters of human blood on pavement looks like. What it smells like, when you pass by a burning hospital. How to ice a blunt-force trauma in your soul. How to suture a throat broken from crying.

Close his eyes, and he still remembers the weight of Flevance’s death on his back, against his sides, under his stomach.

***

_Don’t die_ , Corazon’d said.  
It’d been snowing on Minion Island, Corazon a stain-blur against bleach-white. The man’s hand had felt cold against Law’s fever-hot forehead.  
_Don’t die_ , had been Corazon’s warning. As if he could yell the hopelessness out of a small, shivering child. _Don’t you dare die on me, Law._

The truth is that Law’d been dead for a long time. The truth is that Corazon made him remember what it’d felt like to have Lami tugging at the back of his shirt, what it’d felt like when his father had pulled him aside amidst gunfire beyond their thin walls and told him that they’d find a cure, what it’d felt like to believe, even for a second, that there would always be a kind hand to show him mercy.

What Law knows is that he’ll never forget how he'd meant it when he told Corazon that he was still alive.

***

Law still remembers the weight of _I love you._

Down in the innards of the Polar Tang, he flips through the pages of an old, battered book. _Flevance, the White City._ The black-and-white photos of his childhood look back at him, haunted but vibrant. In all his years of wandering, there still hasn’t been an island or a town as beautiful as the one he was born in.

Jean Bart passes by to deliver a report on their current coordinates. Glances at what Law is reading, and asks, harmlessly: _Have you ever been there before?_

 _A long time ago,_ Law replies, and closes his eyes. 

The engines of the submarine pulse under him like a heartbeat.


End file.
